Discuss mailing list

[Brian Koontz <brian AT opennicproject.org>]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2015 at 12:34:20PM -0600, Jerry Pipes wrote:
> This morning I took the plunge and changed my DNS settings in my router
> to point to my nearest OpenNIC name servers.  Everything seemed fine at
> first, but about two hours later, none of the computers in my house could
> resolve names anymore.  I gave up and switched my router settings back,
> and everything is fine now.  I checked the status on the Tier2 wiki page,
> and I never saw that those name servers were down.  Can anyone suggest a
> reason for this behavior?  

Both servers check out fine.  It sounds to me like your ISP might be
redirecting port 53 access (Comcast, by chance?), and that it took some
time for your DNS changes to propagate through to the other computers (esp.
if done at the router).  Browsers cache their DNS settings for quite a
while.

> On a separate topic, I'm interested in setting up my own server and
> becoming a member of the network.  I'd like to know what kind of hardware
> most people are running, so I know what I should buy (or start checking
> Craigslist if it's something more expensive!).  I'm guessing a Raspberry
> Pi isn't going to cut it.  :)

A RPi would be great for a local caching server!  If you're interested in
running a Tier 2, you'd most likely want a *nix-based VM hosted elsewhere
to do this.  Processing and bandwidth requirements are modest.  The
important thing is that you will want to run whitelisting and some firewall
rules that will throttle down the connection considerably in the event of a
DDOS attack.

  --Brian